


He Who Laughs Last

by CornetHummy



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers Generation One
Genre: Dehumanization, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), POV First Person, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17447072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CornetHummy/pseuds/CornetHummy
Summary: Grotusque tells the story of his life amid the Monsterbots, the Autobots that other Autobots don't like to talk about. Featuring chatty asides, serious body image issues, and bad jokes.





	He Who Laughs Last

**Author's Note:**

> So this is mooostly loosely (very loosely) based off of G1 canon, but I'm pulling a lot of ideas from the IDW comics too. I don't know how long it'll be or how often it'll update. It's just me playing around with some underused characters I love.

They call it “construction shock.”

See, if you’re forged the spark grasps onto the Sentio Metallico and starts molding it into the protoform. Life fills the metal, energon starts flowing, Primus’s gift of blah blah blah. According to some folks, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and we’re all abominations. I don’t really care. I mean, I know I’m an abomination, but leave a bunch of miners and fliers alone, will ya?

But right, let me get back to what I was talking about. Forging’s kind of a lost art nowadays, so let’s say you take a frozen spark and stick it in the body you want someone to have. Because you’ve decided that’s your right to choose for somebody, I guess. The machine needs more gears. So the spark lights up and animates the body, but it can’t shape it the way it wants. There’s no Sentio Metallico. What you have in there is what you get.

Usually this is fine. It’s just that once in a thousand sparks or so, one doesn’t want to take. It flares out in panic and fills the body with panic too, and you spend your first few seconds of life in the worst pain imaginable. Hence, construction shock.

Whatever the Hell my spark shape was originally, it sure wasn’t this. So that’s probably why my earliest memories are a delirium of burning limbs, uncontrolled movements and visual static. I mean, that or the asshole who made us didn’t know what he was doing, but far be it from me to disparage the late, great creator of the Monsterbots.

While I’m at it, hey! Thanks, Mastermind, for the whole “gift of life” and everything. Sorry we probably ate you. You know how it is.

At least the pain didn’t last long. Or it did, but my memories are too scrambled to recall it properly. 

At that point I was myself. Turns out not everyone remembers the moment of recognition, of awareness of being an individual and a self that was both body and spark, mind and soul, which is kind of a shame. It’s crystallized for me, this feeling like the worst fog in the world cleared right in front of me and I could see forever. I could feel energy running through my limbs, the circuitry in my chassis, the flex of wings on my back. I wanted to fly with those wings, to gallop and leap and climb with my paws, to claw and tear and howl just to see what I could do. I reared back and roared, the sound shaking my vocalizer and reverberating through my entire body. I was new, and restless, and I wanted to  _ play _ . 

* * *

So, funny aside about that word.

“Play,” in species that have a childhood, is said to be a way that juvenile creatures learn how to interact with the world. They tussle with one another, or roll around, or maybe they construct toys and fiddle with them just to see what they do. According to some organic supremacists, we shouldn’t have a “play” instinct because we don’t have a childhood. We’re born with all the cognitive function we need and are born to fulfill an automated purpose. All those symphonies we’ve composed and sculptures we’ve designed are just a mindless attempt to emulate organic life. A lot of Functionist holdouts seem to hold the same views, only from a perspective of “you don’t need to explore anything because you were born to do what we want you to do.” In both extremes, creativity, exploration and curiosity for its own sake don’t really have a place in our lives. The anarchic drive to play is something to be repressed. And Primus knows it’s been squashed down over the course of this war, where everything we do needs to be in the name of the Badge and the Cause.

Alright, alright. I promised myself I wouldn’t get too soapboxy here. I just like to think about this sort of thing. It’s part of my job. Back to the pretentious memoirs.

* * *

Mastermind did not seem keen on the idea of letting us out of our reinforced containment units no matter how much we jostled, growled, hissed or roared. He was a tall, broad box of a ‘Bot, the kind who you knew wore a faceplate for the way it made him look mysterious. He held his head high, swaggering in front of his “creations” with the confidence of someone on the other side of protective reinforced glass. I thought I caught a wince when I ran my long fangs against the glass, a double-take at a rustle from the box to the left of me, but soon enough he was back to leering at us behind that visor, admiring his work.

I couldn’t see the others. The door of the chamber was glass and the sides steel hard enough not to buckle when I threw my body against it, sturdy enough not to rock even under the weight of my bigger companions. That’s a psychological tactic, that right there, making sure the first and only thing we could see at first was him. I bet it was supposed to invoke a sense of inferiority in us, or respect for his authority. It could isolate us from one another. Didn’t work, obviously, but on some bitter level I admire the foresight. If he was better at understanding the mind, maybe he would have had us working for him after all.

And that’s quite enough of me giving him the benefit of anything.

It did mean that the first thing we heard after our own voices, the buzzing and humming of machinery and the last trickling of liquid from our chambers, was his own bellow. I don’t remember everything he said, so you’ll forgive me if I paraphrase a little.

“Blah blah blah, I’m so smart, I made you, me me me, look how smart I am, oops now I am dead.”

Eh, no. There was a little more to it than that. I’m going to try to recall in full one bit of his speech, droning on over our growls, snarls and scratches, because it’s never left my head. 

“You are beasts,” he told us. “My Monsterbots, conjured from the nightmares left behind when we first encountered the organic species. The Decepticons think they have the right to use fear as a weapon, with their looming Soundwave and his spies. And Prime lets them, saying we need to be more ‘righteous’ and bright in comparison. But why shouldn’t they fear us? Why shouldn’t we use terror against their Terrorcons? That’s why you’re here. That is why you were made-why you were born. Let them see you roaring with pride and malice, bearing the Autobrand, and they’ll understand what we could be if we stopped limiting ourselves.”

I remember this so clearly because it was when I started listening. There was something about the way he was going on in front of us as if talking to objects. This was for his benefit, his reward for the work involved in making us. He was talking to himself. 

In that way, I guess I should thank him for teaching me the first three lessons. The first: always listen when people talk in front of you, especially to themselves. And the second: when you’re not a person to someone, they reveal a lot more about themselves than they think.

The third, of course, was that we weren’t really people, not as far as Mastermind was concerned. 

I only had a moment to reflect on this before I heard an explosive crash of glass and wiring and saw the rapid swipe of a shining gold scythe take Mastermind’s head right off.

The culprit stood looming and massive, his head a red-orange disc with massive eyes and beetle clamp jaws surrounding a gleeful, grinning mouth that licked the spilt energon off his scythe-claw. He chittered, a noise that turned into a low chuckle, as he tilted his head at us as if to ask: what are you waiting for?

And that’s what Repugnus did, what he’d do so many other times. He gave us permission.

Rearing back, I smashed my big head as hard as I could into that glass, shattering it open with my tusks and bounding forward, the pain hardly registering at all. I held out my wings to slow my fall and found myself hovering, those little things somehow capable of carrying my big, clumsy body, and laughed at the very idea. And then kept laughing as the third one broke out, a two-headed dragon with a massive wingspan. I laughed as we tore through console and screen just to hear the sound of breaking, just to feel the sensation of metal buckling under our claws. It was play, and it was carnage, and it was just so much fun.

The supercharged energon Mastermind had run through our bodies gave us a rush like nothing else I’ve had since, the kind that has to be embraced. I threw back my head and roared in between bouts of gleeful belly-laughs from deep in my frame, and something searing and blinding came rushing out of my mouth. I’d discovered our fire-breath at the expense of the now-melted lab door, which only encouraged me to give into that drive to tear, leap and bite anything in my way. 

From here, things become a blur, kind of like the exact point where a bender goes from ‘stuff you remember doing’ to ‘stuff you find out about later when you get the bill.’ It’s a beautiful blur, full of fire and the smell of burnt, spilled energon. There were alarms, shouts of confusion and fear. I think I remember tearing pipes off of a wall. I might have taken someone’s arm off; kinda hope not. 

See, nobody wants to talk about what happened when we were born, because everything about it goes against the whole Autobot creed and mythos. Sure, an Autobot made us, and other Autobots gave him the money and resources to do so, and sure we were clearly made a little off-kilter and unhealthy, and certainly the idea of being made to scare someone else isn’t very Autobottly no matter how you cut it. So it was covered up. Even I can’t dig up much information about it anymore. So if you’re out there, guy whose arm I ate, know that I’m sorry and it was nothing personal. 

The next thing I remember clearly, we’d torn right out of the ruined lab. Doublecross unfolded his wings and took off in flight above us, casting a huge shadow and spraying twin spirals of flame into the sky. Repugnus threw his head back, clicked his beetle-jaws and hissed in triumph. I crouched down, angled my wings and took a leap that sent me soaring into the sky, springing forth through the clouds of smoke just to see where it would take me. It felt right, to be rampaging like this. No, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ weren’t really part of the equation. I wasn’t thinking in those terms.    
No, it was fun. It was joyous. It made me happy, happier than I’d ever been in my, um, hour or so of life, and that’s all I could think about at the time. I felt my biolights glowing as the hot air ran over and under my wings. I wanted to keep following that impulse all across this pockmarked, ruin-strewn moon where they’d built that base. 

And then I landed right in a shallow, muddy lake. Which turned out to be a fitting metaphor for what happened next, but that’s a coincidence, see.

The mud didn’t bother me, or the cold splash that hit me in the face and knocked me out of my rush. I just shook myself out, lifted a paw to flick off the excess, and then stopped to actually look at my paw. My front paws, with their long claws on legs too stubby for my body.

That’s when I saw my reflection.

Those glowering blue eyes, that snarl, those tusks half as long as my oversized head, those were mine. That mismatch of features, intentionally twisted with scars at the eyes where Mastermind had soldered my faceplates together, that’s what others would see when they saw me. That’s why even Mastermind kept giving me those nervous glances when I was in my chamber. That’s what those fleeing lab workers saw, my terrible, awful face. 

I withdrew immediately, recoiling and falling back into the mud. Before I realized it I’d transformed, not intentionally but out of some kind of instinct, into a heavyset root mode with wings. One more glance at my reflection didn’t show a pretty picture. Mastermind, to his credit I guess, had thought of everything, giving me a permanent scowl with sunken-in cheeks and fangs even in my ‘bot form. There were echoes of those overgrown tusks in the shape of my helm, as if to mock me. 

I was still sitting like that, stunned in the mud, when Repugnus and Doublecross caught up with me. Doublecross landed and immediately transformed into root mode, probably realizing it would make walking a lot easier. He moved forward like he wanted to say something, then suddenly jerked back and stared at one of his dragon-head hands, baffled by something he wouldn’t mention.

Repugnus, though, he just splashed right next to me and looked down at himself in his insectoid-whatever form, and he smiled. He saw himself and loved it. And then he turned to me, leering, without transforming at all.

“What? You run out of energy already?” He chittered. “We’ve only just gotten started.” 

What was I supposed to say? ‘Sorry, I’m distressed over how I look? I just scared myself?’ I hadn’t known Pug all that long and already I could tell that wasn’t going to fly with him. Somehow he’d taken command of us just by his force of personality. 

It was then that I noticed the other shapes approaching us, tanks and cars veering in from the distance in every angle. We were surrounded already. 

“...Nah. Just thinkin’, that’s all.” I stood up, turned to the other two and gestured around to the Autobot forces heading our way. “Say, let’s at least give ‘em a challenge before they go and ruin the fun?” 

And I laughed again, because after what I’d seen of myself, none of those gun-toting Standard-formers could intimidate me. I wasn’t going to let anyone use me as their weapon. Nothing else would scare me ever again. 


End file.
